With the wonderful lip sync piece “i am your girlfriend” New York City based performance artist, Columbia student, Chez Deep member and Original Plumbing contributorHari Nef explores and ironically questions the universe of iconic femininity as it is and always has been omnipresent in the media. For the 21-minutes performance Hari borrows and appropriates the voices of modern-time divas and female media personalities and role models such as Björk, Beyoncé, Aileen Wuornos, Margaret Cho, Scarlett Johansson, embodying them with a beautiful, multilayered ambiguity and a breathtaking endurance.
The video below was shot at Dixon Place, Manhattan on August 1st and is currently featured over at DIS magazine as an entry to the DIScrit 89plus competition, which supports young artists born in or after 1989. If you want to help Hari win a grand of around 15.000$ you can now register on the DIS site and vote (the voting period was just extended for an indefinite period of time). For more of Hari’s work please check out YouTube or tumblr.

Photographer and Original Plumbing maker Amos Mac has sent us a collection of beautiful pictures from a photo shoot with New York City based writer, visual artist and performance artist Stephen Boyer, one of the co-founders of the The People’s Library and editor of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Stephen has just recently released his debut novel Parasite, which was published by Publication Studies in January and tells the story of a young boy, who runs away from home and becomes a sex worker in San Francisco. You can get a first impression of the book and its author by watching this recording of a reading Steven did at the St Marks Bookstore earlier this year.
The photos of Steven were taken at his home in Chelsea, where he lives in the basement of the former house of Geraldine Page and her husband and partner Rip Torn. The place is today occumpied by Page 22, an arts space managed by Page’s son Tony Torn. All pictures are courtesy Amos Mac.

New York City-based photographer Veretta Cobler‘s book New York Underground 1970-1980 offers beautiful insights into the New York club scene of the disco era and overflows with glam, glitter and sexual tension. The book, which is completely kept in black and white, was published in 2004 by Parkstone International and is currently available for a sale price of 5,00$ on Amazon.com. It is also available in German (similarly cheap) and French (a little more expensive), although it is only the photographer’s introduction that differs. Here’s a little preview:

In the summer of 2012, undergraduate student at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, Yulan Grant, had the idea to make a zine. Her theme: a visual history of baby hairs, a technique of gel-sculpting the wispy hairs at one’s hairline, popular in Black and Latino culture. Given her studies in graphic design, she had no issue with the visuals, but needed writing. For this, she contacted her close friends and schoolmates at the affiliated Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, Brandon Owens and Justin Allen. Brandon wrote two haiku on the topic, and Justin, a piece of prose poetry. Before the end of the summer the zine was finished, copies printed. By fall, it had been included into traveling zine archive the POCZine Project.

Soon their zine, simply titled Baby Hair, would be traveling the country with the works of numerous other people of color that decided to bypass the publishing industry in favor of complete artistic freedom. But not before they were offered a gig by aspiring curator Johnny Sagan.

Early meetings with Sagan, under the curatorial name Snowy Wilderness, left both Grant and Allen in bewilderment. Tasks were listed off at a rapid pace and seemed both promising and abstract. The gig: Sagan, curating a series of art shows in collaboration with Brooklyn-based gallery Superchief at Lower East Side bar and gallery space Culturefix, had gotten a hold of a copy of Baby Hair and wanted Grant and Allen to produce in house zines to accompany the gallery shows. Their first project, a zine for House of Ladosha’s show THE WHOLE HOUSE EATS.

Peter Berlin is the image of sex for the generation of gay men who came of age in the 70s. He cut an iconoclastic figure in his skintight pants and blond pageboy atop a sleek torso, pectorals as hard as his cock and as high as his cheekbones. He was a gay cult figure, a fetish object in multiple senses: both an icon for worship and sexual fixation. And the highest Peter Berlin devotee was Peter Berlin himself. The photographer, filmmaker, mixed-media artist and designer used himself as his own model and muse, elevating self-portraiture and naked, unashamed gay eroticism to new levels of artistic legitimacy. Now, some of his most evocative photographs are on sale, offered by the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City.

On Saturday the New York artist collective FCKNLZ will conquer the Broadway with the “Toni Bernice Show” at the Museum of Arts and Design. The new stage piece, which will be taped live, is the culmination point of Club Kid Herstory Month, a six week theater project through which the group examined the legacy of ’90s club kids by re-creating their legendary appearances on TV talk shows.
Tickets for the event can be purchased here (“$15 admission includes complimentary champagne and poppers”) – the people in the audience are invited to dress up as their favorite club kid or invent their own – the best costumes will be awarded by special guests Astro Erle and Sophia Lamar. For more information check out the FCKNLZ website or the event’s Facebook page. Below you find trading cards with all characters and a video segment from the show. Picture on top by Ben Pier.

25 years ago writer Sarah Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard (“United in Anger”) started MIX NYC, a festival for experimental queer films, showing movies that were neither shown at gay film festivals nor in museums. Since back then, MIX NYC has become one of the most important platforms (if not the most important platform) for experimental movies of queer and trans* artists and has motivated artists and film fans around the world to start their own version of the event. MIX has also become famous for its unique way of presenting its movies in special environments and in combination with arts installations and performances.

The 25th edition of the festival will take place at a venue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn in a 17,000 square foot warehouse, which was redesigned from scratch (accoding to the MIX Facebook page the theme for this year’s venue transformation “involves cocooning and hammocks”, which sounds like fun). Like ever year MIX will feature both excting short screenings dealing with various subjects (my personal favorite is “Exploding Lineage!”, a program showing “queer of color histories in experimental film” curated by Queer Rebels Productions, trailer here), as well as feature movies like the Fifth Column documentary “She Said Boom”, Cheryl Dunye’s “Mommy Is Coming” or “Desaliniados”, a three-way romance by Argentinian director Pablo Oliverio. In conjunction with its 25th anniversary the festival will also take a look back and show important milestone in queer avant-garde film from the last 25 years, curated in collaboration with the makers of the queer screening series Dirty Looks NYC.

The Walter Collection recently presented the first New York solo show by Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955 – 1989), one of the most important artists of British queer culture of the 1980s. The show opened in March an closed on July 28, displaying works from Rotimi’s series “Nothing to Lose” from 1989, as well as from “Ecstatic Antibodies”, for which he collaborated with his boyfriend Alex Hirst and which was shown in a group exhibition dealing with HIV/AIDS in 1990. In the large-scale color and black-and-white portraits Rotomi explores sexuality, race and religion and recontextualizes his cultural and religious background as the child of a traditional Yoruba upbringing (his Nigerian family had to flee to the U.K. in 1960 after a military coup).
For everyone who wasn’t able to see the exhibition here’s a little collection of pictures that were shown in it. More of the featured photographs can be found below this article about the show on Huffington Post, for more background information about the exhibition check out this press release (pdf) published by The Walter Collection as well as this article on Africa is a Country. To get a bigger overview on the artist’s work please check out the website of the Association of Black Photographers/Autograph ABP, which Rotimi co-founded in 1988.

Fashion has always been a genre New York based artist K8 Hardy both likes to passionately criticize for its commercialism and elitism, while and at the same time tries to reinvent and develop using her own DIY approach to manipulate it as a way of expressing individualism. After publishing four issues of a zine entitled FashionFashion between 2004 and 2008 and and creating her own fashion collection (“J’APPROVE“) in collaboration with JF and Son in 2010, Hardy just recently presented another artistic attempt to subvert the fashion business: On May 20 she staged a runway show as a contribution to the Whitney Biennial, which both deconstructed the rules of the catwalk, while at the same time opened up the ritual to new forms by using cheap material like clothes from thrift stores and letting the models walk in slow motion sideways, backwards, and in their own freestyle. The set of the show was designed by Oscar Tuazon, another Biennial artist. “I wanted to do a fashion show so that we can look at fashion in a different context outside of commercialism and outside of the marketing that’s usually associated with a fashion show,” Hardy said in an interview with (sic!) ELLE. “I wanted to make a statement with the looks of a more democratic expression outside of luxury.” Here’s a collection of pictures + an embeddable slideshow and a blurry video of the show, found on Amos Mac’s tumblr, New York Magazine online (by Bek Andersen), Art in America (slightshow) and on the artist’s YouTube page (video).